GoKawiil[Editor’s note: Not only is it a bit rude to call someone a “featherbrain,” it’s also highly inaccurate, Louis Lefebvre writes in ‘A Bird’s IQ,’ translated from the original French by Pablo Strauss and out now from Greystone Books. In fact, when humans study birds, there’s a lot we can learn about ourselves. In this excerpt, Lefebvre shares a litany of innovative, sometimes bloody-minded, corvid meal acquisition tactics.]
In descending order, the corvids with the most recorded innovations are the Eurasian carrion crow (Corvus corone), the common raven (Corvus corax), the Eurasian magpie (Pica pica), the house crow (Corvus splendens), and the American crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos).
Among the most jaw-dropping American crow innovations that have been observed was an individual disappearing for more than nine minutes into the near-vertical shaft of a decommissioned mine, only to emerge with a bat.
Another memorable feat is the crow that stole a fish from an otter while the latter was distracted by its accomplice, a second crow, which tugged on the otter’s tail.
Or how about the big-city crows in Toronto surveying the area around a downtown office tower to pick up birds who crash into windows, with one pair of crows even apparently chasing a kinglet in flight directly into one of these windows?
Another crow made a pointed tool out of a splinter of wood torn from the slat in a fence, and then used it as a probe to fetch a spider in a hole. And a Wisconsin crow picked up a dead fish from the mud of a dried-up pond and carried it to a birdbath, presumably to wash it off.
Turning to common ravens, there are many observed cases of them coming in after wolves and humans have killed prey and then eating the remains. At least five such cases involved biologists: in Montana, Crow White demonstrated that ravens were attracted specifically by gunshots in the forest, in comparison with other sounds (a horn, a human simply walking, a whistle) that attracted them in other habitats.
In Minnesota, Fred Harrington showed that imitating wolf howls was enough to change the direction of ravens in flight. And also in Minnesota, Paul Frame broadcast recordings of rabbit and deer distress calls, with the aim of trapping wolves; three times out of four, ravens turned up instead.
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In Colorado, wildlife biologist Merle Richmond and his canoeing companion allowed themselves to be led by a common raven “squawking loudly and thrashing around” near a lakeshore. The raven “renewed its showy antics” if the biologists lagged too far behind, and the biologists eventually realized it was leading them directly to a nest of two Canada geese, who fled at the sight of humans. At this point the raven and its “silent partner” swooped in and nabbed “a gosling apiece,” which they carried off to eat on a stump across the bay.
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